Burnt gold
burnt gold the first and final chapter The armies of greed lay waste to the Earth and all its creatures. In our hunger for energy- for more and more- we’ve devastated our planet. We’re neck deep in festering industrial muck, in a trash heap of ever expanding waste and decay. Overpopulation, overdevelopment, nuclear terrorism, environmental warfare, warfare itself, radiation leakage from power plants and waste dumps, toxic runoff, air pollution, deforestation, global warming, ozone destruction... Our once blue-green and beautiful Earth is now a dying cesspool- an oozing womb cut deep into the face of the universe. Dollar for dollar, we’ve bought out extinction. So who am I? I’m a neighbour, a friend, the enemy. I am anonymous. I am invisible. I am everywhere. I shuffle past you in a dense crowd, shoulder to jammed shoulder, unwashed because of the water shortages, stinking and sickly looking from the polluted air that is all that’s left of our oxygen. Like you, I am trapped in a rat warren of dusty grey concrete; tracked by the overpowering net of life. I am badly outnumbered; mostly numbered. I’m scarred, scared, hunted and all too human. Why am I writing this? Why are you reading this? There are so many more questions that are needed to be answered. What is it like wherever you are reading this? Is the earth completely destroyed? Are you living on Mars, on Pluto? Maybe in another letter you could put this. I won’t be able to read it of course because I shall be dead soon enough. If the earth itself doesn’t kill me then mankind will. I am dying, dying with the rest of the earth. It was that day. That day that had started it all. I had just woken up, my bare hands going numb because they were pressed against the icy stone floor. I heard screaming from behind me. Upon hearing a loud explosion I felt a wave of heat against my neck, surging forward and threatening to worm its way into my body and boil my dirty blood. Half my body was cold, the other half was hot. All the other smaller explosions and electrified shots all seemed so far away, like they were underwater, to me as I still had the sound of the flames ringing in my ears. Making my ears bleed just as much as the blood trickling down my neck from the blast. I took no notice of it. My eyes weren’t flashing red yet so I wasn’t dying... Unfortunately as I had just found myself in the middle of Manchester’s biggest battle fields. I checked my environment, the Golden Arches. They had been made by lumps of gold drawn out of the ground by magnetism when the moon was being torn apart. They had formed solidified gold that bent in ever so slightly because they were being drawn back to the Earth’s magnetism. About four of them on either side did this and by now they almost touched in the middle, hence the name Golden Arches. Manchester used it as one of their bases, able to tunnel underneath the solidified gold and dig deeper and deeper to create one of their army bases on the edge of Manchester territory. If they were being attacked now then it had begun. The war was starting and everyone was coming for Manchester. The wars had started by a rockart being invented by an English Inventor, Eerie Strog. He had tested his invention and proved that it could go to far away planets that would have taken at least seventeen years by normal rockart in a matter of days. Thus saving England from being on Earth when the planet exploded, but none of the other countries could be saved. As each one of them were competing against each other and to get off the planet quicker. Now the other countries were getting desperate as they had no ideas so they demanded for the paperwork to make their own but Stog refused and said that England had to look after their own. But no city in England can decide who should leave first so that was then going to result in a war amongst cities. Each city had its own territory and they had to keep that territory until they proved that they were worthy of leaving first. Manchester was the biggest threat. Why? Because Manchester was an army base. An army base that was hiding Strog’s rockart. My head spun with nausea as a fellow citizen ran past screaming. I then suddenly remembered that there were houses near the Golden Arches; things were going to get messy. I jumped up onto my feet, all past worries and confusion was gone, then I realised that my ankle was sprained. Just managing to not scream was hard enough, I had to tense the muscles in my neck and in my leg as I walked... Well, hobbled to the place where I had last heard the female civilian running from or to and staggered over until I fell forward and my hands hit smooth polyfibre. It felt cold beneath my hands that meant that nobody was inside it. I felt my way around until another, harder, type of material under my palms. The door gave way from the heat radiation coming from my hands and stepping inside, I realised the big mistake I’d made. If you’re in the middle of a war, don’t go into a deserted house that has obviously been deserted for a reason... There was a slow, rhythmic ticking coming from the far side of an empty shell of a house. The heavy metal door slammed shut behind me and the people who had made the house programmed it so that it could only be opened from the outside, to trap in whatever was inside. The ticking was coming from something that smelt heavily of burnt gold and heated electrons, otherwise known as a New World Bomb. I was trapped inside a cold metal box, that could only be opened from the outside and has a bomb inside. And I thought being blind was bad! Well, how did I survive? I’m a cyborg, part human and part well developed robot. A blind cyborg but at least I’ll never die. This, in this world, isn’t a good thing. I’m dying, always dying, dying with the earth itself. Category:Stories Category:Future Category:Cyborgs Category:Pollution Category:Gold Category:War Category:Fiction